We think of Delhi as a concrete jungle, which, indubitably, it is. However, the city is on the tail end of the Aravallis and their forests, many of which are, happily, in different stages of rewilding. Recent surveys of these forests show that they harbour an astonishingly rich diversity of wildlife with relatively high densities of mammals in non-protected areas. As someone who has been documenting life in these forests over the last few decades, I have, in recent times, chronicled many species that used to be rare to find and can now be spotted.

The growing awareness about the conservation and protection of Delhi’s urban forests is a welcome breath of fresh air for conservationists and wildlife lovers like me. Much more needs to be done but I am happy that in my years as a chronicler of the city’s animals, I have got to see some of these amazing species return to their lost habitats.

Author: Devendra Singh, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Devendra Singh

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For years, locals in the remote district of Ratnagiri in Maharashtra have supplemented their agrarian livelihoods by poaching the Indian pangolin, a species given the highest protection under India’s Wildlife Protection Act. Through his non-profit Sahyadri Nisarga Mitra, Katdare, locally known as Bhau, had tried everything from organising awareness campaigns to training police to identify poached pangolin parts.

A Ratnagiri local himself, Bhau dropped out of college and has chosen to learn from the field since 1992. He began to wonder, through his immersion in local communities, if creating an emotional connection with the pangolins in the minds of the locals could be the key to finally putting an end to poaching.
“In many ways, conservation is the essence of all religion,” he says.

In 2020, he enlisted the help of the temple priest in the Dugwe village of Ratnagiri. Together they created an event celebrating the scaly mammal – “Khawlotsav” or Pangolin Festival – coinciding with the World Pangolin Day that falls on the third Saturday of February.

Bhau asked toymakers from a nearby town to make a large effigy of the animal, which was then hidden in a deep thicket. When villagers found it, they bedecked it in the finery usually reserved for the village deity and brought it back to the temple with great fanfare. Traditional dances were performed in its honour, and prayers were dedicated to the animals that ate the ants and termites that often infested locals’ crops. Villagers even prayed for better sense and wisdom to prevail upon animal traffickers and poachers. The pangolin replica was then installed in the temple, beside the idol of the village god and finally, it was placed on an elegant scarlet palanquin and paraded from house to house.

In the past, Bhau’s team had made people swear oaths to protect the species and raise awareness not only in their region, but also in neighbouring villages.
“At the end of the festival, they all swore the same oath again, and I could sense a shift,” he recalls.

A few months ago, someone sent him a video of the villagers’ reaction to a pangolin that had strayed into the village. In the past, it would have been killed without a thought. This time, however, when someone suggested they kill it as usual and sell its scales, a village elder reminded them of their oath to protect pangolins.

On a recent visit to the Dugwe village temple, Bhau discovered that the priest – his old ally – had placed a picture of a pangolin permanently next to the deity. The discovery has made him hopeful that their festival might become a tradition.

As he gears up for World Pangolin Day this year, the 60-year-old barefoot conservationist aims to continue fostering lasting connections between men and animals through India’s rich religious and cultural traditions. To advance the cause of sea turtle conservation in a neighbouring district, he plans to organise a drama performance about the ten avatars of Lord Vishnu, who took the form of a turtle in his second incarnation.
“If we get them to think of turtles as incarnations of their favourite god, maybe we’d have a shot at protecting them too,” Bhau says.

Authors: Geetanjali Krishna and Snighdha Bansal, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Sahyadri Nisarga Mitra

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“It was an insect apocalypse,” James Mawle says of the moment, last Spring, when he realised that two decades of conservation work on his North Yorkshire sheep, hay and grouse farm had paid off. “The mayfly had hatched and the air was so thick with insect life you barely see. It was like a moment from a David Attenborough documentary.”

When Mawle’s father bought Coverhead in the 1980s, the river from which the farm derived its name had been reduced to a dribble, insect life was largely absent and the land was prone to regular flash floods, or ‘spates’, which washed away smaller river rocks and turned larger rocks, as Mawle evocatively puts it, into ‘grinders for aquatic life’. Mawle was amazed to hear that someone had once offered to buy the farm’s salmon-fishing rights. “What salmon?,” Mawle says, wide-eyed. “How could our poor parched river support salmon?”

The chief culprit was ‘gripping’, the 20th century practice of digging moorland drains to speed up runoff and dry out the ground. Britain’s 1946 Hill Farming Act encouraged it, offering farmers up to 80 percent of the cost of digging the 18-inch deep, foot-wide ditches it was believed would increase agricultural yields (a subsidy that continued into the 1980s). Coverhead’s legacy was a five-mile chain of grips, which had drained the top-level peat and routinely led to juvenile animals such as lambs and grouse chicks getting trapped in its depressions. The flash floods caused by the grips also increased the risk, in an era of unpredictable rainfall, of flooding of communities down-river.

The clincher for Mawle, however, was the discovery that moister peat is carbon-storing peat. “Blocking the grips became the obvious thing to do,” he says.

Mawle took over the farm in the early 2000s and began blocking the grips by forming small peat dams downhill of the drains. He completed plugging Coverhead’s hundreds of grips in 2009,and his farm was thriving.

“Where formerly the [river] Cover was a raging brown torrent or a dry boulder field it was not slower flowing and clear,” Mawle says, “vegetation had returned to the edges and smaller stones were settling in the riverbed; peat was blooming on the moors. Trout and insect life had returned too!”

Rewetting, however, can be a fine balance, with the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust warning that greenhouse gases can temporarily increase from bog habitat as soils rewet.

Buoyed by his rewilding successes, Mawle, with the Yorkshire Dales River Trust, has begun work on his next project: restoring the river Cover’s meander. The Cover, as many rivers, was historically straightened to expose fertile farmland and divert flow to watermills. A healthy river, however, traces a curving route across the landscape, slowing its flow and allowing flora and fauna to bloom. The new project has help from some four-legged friends.

“We’re weaving willow around posts sunk into the riverbed to create something like beaver dams in the hope that beavers will come and finish the job for us,” Mawle says, adding that the new snaking route might entice back Cover’s long-lost wild salmon, “wouldn’t that be nice?”

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust

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As a child, 18-year-old British-Bangladeshi Mya-Rose Craig was as in love with nature as she was struck by the fact that the British countryside was preserved for people that didn’t look like her. “It seemed to be a space of whiteness and privilege,” she says.

When it comes to nature conservation, these raced roots run deep. Darwin and Wallace trotted the globe to find ‘animals unknown to man’, forgetting the indigenous people who had coexisted peacefully with them for centuries. US President Teddy Roosevelt famously said that Native Americans were the cause of such environmental and animal population decline, that the state needed to requisition their ancestral lands as national parks. This history, Craig says, has forged a narrative in which young people from visible ethnic minorities “simply think nature is not for them”.

The child of keen bird-watchers, Craig spent her early childhood trailing around the country in search of rare birds such as the cattle egret with her British father Chris and her Bengali mother Helena. At the age of seven, Craig featured in a BBC documentary Twitchers: A Very British Obsession on BBC TV. But it was her realisation that Britain lacked the opportunities and infrastructure for young people to get up close to nature, especially children from ethnic minorities, that motivated the teenager to act.

“In the US they have camps for nature lovers of all kinds, including camps run by world-famous birders and I was dying to do these,” Craid says. “But in the UK there was nothing, especially for city kids.” Frustrated, at the tender age of 14 Craig decided to organise her own nature camp and, not content with the roster of white teenage boys who signed up, Craig reached out to community leaders in inner city areas of the city of Bristol, to advertise the camp to children and teens from a range of ethnic backgrounds. The first camp, in 2015, was a roaring success, with campers documenting moth and bird populations, sleeping under the stars and enjoying a life-changing experience in the process.

“You get these kids who’ve never engaged with nature and they come and have a really good time and that makes me happy,” Craig says, adding that it’s often the boys who are full of bravado who are most squeamish about handling a wriggling bird, or dipping a pond to chart the biodiversity in its murky depths. “I love it when the girls chase them around with a bird in their hands,” she laughs.

In the last census (2011) 13 percent of the UK population, around 8.1 million people, identified themselves as black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME). Yet a 2017 study by Natural England found that just 26.2 percent of black people spent time in the British countryside, compared with 44.2 percent of white people. Meanwhile, only one percent of visitors to UK national parks come from BAME backgrounds.

“Teens from visible minorities tell me they fear the countryside is very white and elitist,” Craig says, “and sadly their fears are confirmed when they experience racism and disapproval on campsites and at nature reserves.”

Black2Nature is now in its seventh year of camps and Craig also campaigns, through the organisation, to increase diversity on the boards of British conservation charities. Undeterred by the pandemic, in 2020 Black2Nature staged nature camps in Craig’s local Chew Valley, where families from socially deprived backgrounds got together in Covid-friendly bubbles to enjoy conservation activities such as bird-ringing and bird-spotting walks. Craig is heading to Warwick University in September 2021 to study politics, but, she says, that’s no excuse to relax her efforts to make the British countryside a welcoming place for everyone. In spring and summer 2021, Black2Nature is planning eight camps for five to 10-year-olds and city teenagers from London and Bristol and the first all-girl Black2Nature camp. In 2020 Craig was awarded an honorary doctorate in science (D.Sc.h.c) from the University of Bristol for her work with Black2Nature.

“There’s a lot to do,” Craig admits. “But the natural world and social justice, won’t wait.”

Author: The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Mya-Rose Craig – Helena Craig

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It was October 2012. A team of conservationists visited a remote dam in Nagaland to study the unique migration behaviour of the Amur falcon that roosts here for a month every year on its way from its breeding grounds in Mongolia, to Africa. Instead, when they reached the Doyang reservoir in Wokha district of Nagaland, they found birds being massacred en masse. Trees on the banks of the reservoir were covered in nets that trapped them by thousands. The air was thick with the smell of their meat being smoked. Local tribes, who have a long tradition of hunting (not just for the table, but also as a means of livelihood) sold the meat of the falcons as far as in Dimapur, over 120 km away. Many confessed to earning over Rs 20,000 [US$270 or GB£200] selling falcon meat in the one month that these birds stopped in Wokha to roost and recuperate from their long flight. Chillingly, they referred to it as an annual ‘harvest’…

The team from Conservation India that witnessed this massacre was led by Bano Haralu, ex-TV journalist and founding trustee of Nagaland Wildlife and Biodiversity Conservation Trust, NWBCT. While some suggested financially incentivising locals to not kill the falcons, Haralu had a different take: “I’ve always believed that the conservation of our wild spaces and species must be its own reward,” she says. “By rewarding locals with money for every falcon they saved, we’d defeat the purpose of conservation…”

Instead, she launched a campaign with local volunteers to alert the wildlife community, as well as the state government about the falcons’ grisly fate in Pangti, Pungro and Okhtosto – the three villages in Wokha district (Nagaland) where the falcons roosted. “Next, we started working to instill a sense of pride that this mysterious bird flew from so far to visit our land every year,” says Haralu. NWBCT initiated a comprehensive programme to change local attitudes towards hunting with the support of the government, as well as leading conservation NGOs. Weekly Eco Clubs for children, one-on-one conversations with each and every villager and advocating with the powerful village council yielded positive results.

Finally, in 2013, just before the beginning of the October migratory season of the Amur falcons, the Pangti Village Council announced a ban on their trapping and killing. The state government instituted stiff penalties for falcon hunters. And that year, Nagaland earned the title of ‘falcon capital of the world’ from the international birding community.

Today, Pangti attracts birders and conservation across the world during the annual Amur falcon migration. The erstwhile hunters of the area have become birding guides who enthusiastically tell guests about the miracle of the Amur falcon’s migration and that the raptor’s five-day flight across the ocean from Nagaland to Africa is the longest non-stop oversea flight in all birds. Meanwhile, as many as a million falcons visit Pangti every year. When they take flight together, the birds block the sun and shadow the skies, providing an unparalleled opportunity to enjoy the spectacle of avian migration. “We’re training locals to set up home stays for birding enthusiasts in the Amur falcon roosting hotspots,” Haralu says. “Now that the local community can see how the Amur falcon can become a source of livelihood for them, they have developed a long-term stake in its conservation.”

Author: Geetanjali Krishna, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Nagaland Wildlife and Biodiversity Conservation Trust, NWBCT

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What can one person do when an entire megapolis begins to lose all of its natural water bodies? Ask Bangalore-based ex-techie Anand Malligavad. In the last three years, he has managed to rope in entire communities to revive five large lakes in India’s Silicon Valley. Now his charity Lake Revivers Collective plans to work on 40 more by 2025. Malligavad has no technical training in lake conservation and rejuvenation: “All I have is a sense of urgency that if we don’t repair the damage we’ve already wrecked,” says the environmentalist, “it’s going to end badly for all of us…”

It all began when Malligavad visited the 36-acre water body, Kyalasanahalli Lake in 2017. “It had been reduced to a bone-dry cricket field and dumping ground,” he recalls. “It struck me that I’d actually seen Bangalore transform from a city of lakes to one where everyone depends on water tankers to meet their daily needs!” So he approached Sansera, the engineering company he worked for, to fund the rejuvenation of the lake. With local volunteers, three earth movers and six trucks, Malligavad removed almost 400,000 cubic meters of mud from the lake. Again with the help of volunteers, he planted 18,000 saplings of indigenous trees including 3,000 fruit trees, 3,000 native plants and 2,000 medicinal plants. The excavated mud was used to create five `islands’ in the lake for birds to nest. In a mere 45 days, the area was transformed and the next monsoon rains filled up a lake that had been parched for 35 years.

Buoyed by this success, Malligavad quit his job to work on lake revival full time and was joined by environmentalist Akshaya Devendra. Not only have they revived four more lakes since then, they have also managed to rope in local corporates to fund their work and volunteers to donate their time. “Some of the lakes we’ve worked on have been in really bad shape,” he says. “For example, Konasandra Lake was so full of sewage and runoffs from nearby pharma companies that instead of water, it had a stinky gel-like sludge.” With funds donated by one of these pharma companies, Malligavad and his team cleaned up the lake in under three months.

These experiences have helped Malligavad develop a lake revival model that can be quickly and cheaply replicated across different terrains. “First, one must view the lake in its context,” he says. This involves, among other things, planting of native trees and plants nearby and strengthening its banks with local grasses. “In the projects we’ve undertaken so far, we have afforested forty percent of the area around our intervention zone,” he says. “This improves the area’s biodiversity and bolsters its water-holding capacity.” Second, the rejuvenated lake must be able to sustain itself naturally after their interventions. To this end, Malligavad and his cohorts at Lake Revivers Collective plant water-purifying lotuses and lilies in the water, soil-binding grasses on the lake’s edge and intersperse these with Miyawaki plantations (a Japanese technique of plantation which enables native saplings to grow ten times faster and denser than usual). Third, they always involve local stakeholders – local communities as well as corporates. “When they reap the undoubted benefits of having a clean waterbody in their vicinity, they are further encouraged to keep it that way,” he says.

And benefits there are aplenty. In the long run, these revitalised lakes will increase the water table levels of a parched Bangalore and provide habitat for hundreds of bird, animal, insect and plant species. Meanwhile Malligavad has acquired quite the reputation as Bangalore’s Lake Man. “After 39 years of consuming so much on this planet, I’ve decided it’s time to give back,” he says. “Now I’ve dedicated my entire life to water, wildlife and afforestation and it feels good…”

Author: Geetanjali Krishna, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Anand Malligavad, Bengaluru, India

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